Photo Flash: Beatboxer And Electric Cellist Mix It Up At The PSO BRAVO! School Day Concert

The Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO) gave multiple performances of its BRAVO! School Day Concert featuring Grammy-nominated beatboxer Christylez Bacon and electric cellist Wytold for area elementary students in Princeton's Richardson Auditorium and Trenton's Grace A. Dunn Middle School on May 15 and 16, respectively. The program featured exciting orchestral music, movie themes, and hip hop! PSO Music Director Rossen Milanov conducted the orchestra at all five concerts. The concerts were provided free of charge through the support of individual and corporate donors.

The program included excerpts from famous works by Beethoven, Dvo?ák, Mozart, and Grieg, plus Christylez Bacon's It's the Beatbox, Baroque Mix and Bach Remix, written with Wytold. The students had a great time learning to beatbox, and responded enthusiastically to the orchestra's opening strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Mozart's popular Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the rousing finale of Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt, and John Williams' Star Wars Theme.

Grammy-nominated beatboxer/multi-instrumentalist/composer Christylez Bacon and the wildly original six-string electric cellist/composer Wytold blend fresh art forms like progressive Hip-Hop, live-looping, and instrumental innovation with all sorts of unique and clever twists. From beatboxing to improvisation, the duo explores the contrasting worlds of Classical and Hip-Hop music with their own take on classical favorites by composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Strauss. Their innovative genre-bending approach creates orchestrated Hip-Hop compositions out of DJ sampling, classical technique, rhyming, and mash-ups.

Support for the orchestra's PSO BRAVO! School Day concerts is welcome. Many thanks to Bloomberg Philanthropies for providing volunteers to help execute the event. All PSO BRAVO! education programs are free to participating students and schools thanks to generous sponsors who believe in the importance of the arts in education. To learn more about PSO BRAVO! education programs or to offer support to continue to bring music to Trenton, call the orchestra's office at (609) 497-0020.

Photo Credit: PSO